How I update my website on my server

If you’re self-hosting, it’s actually surprisingly hard to find the “right way” to update your website on push. Ideally you would be self-hosting Git and would be able to directly add a recieve-pack hook to build whatever you need server-side. But for the following reasons:

• not self-hosting a Git server,
• not having the necessary build tools on your server (and there might actually be good reason for this: do you really want to install TeX Live on your server?)

automatically building stuff on your website becomes a major PITA.

So let me suggest another approach: instead of automating “server receives stuff => server builds”, why not automate “client pushes => client builds => client sends build output to server”? Particularly for smaller sysadmins like myself, the server is not actually more powerful than the client: I’m running a low-resource Vultr cloud instance, but other people might be self-hosting with their own hardware like a Raspberry Pi. For us, building client-side may actually be the better solution.

Here’s how it works. I write a pre-push hook (I would’ve preferred post-push, but it doesn’t really matter and post-push hooks don’t exist) that looks like this:

make
tar -czhf dennisc.tar.gz build/*
scp dennisc.tar.gz HOST:dennisc.tar.gz
ssh HOST "tar -xvf dennisc.tar.gz && rm -rf dennisc.net && mv build dennisc.net"

where HOST is the IP of my server. In order to automatically authenticate into SSH, you need to set up an SSH key and configure HOST to use said SSH key in ~/.ssh/config. What my SSH config looks like is

Host mathadvance
    Hostname 45.32.70.22
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/mathadvance
    User mast

(I’m revealing the IP of our server since it’s public information anyway: ping dennisc.net will get you it.)

Anyway, what this hook does is it builds my website using the Makefile, creates a zipped tarball from the build output, copies the tarball to my server, and extracts the tarball/moves it to the proper location. It’s nothing complicated, though it is mildly annoying that I have to set this up on all my devices.